Category Archives: Australian wine

Sometimes I feel like a broken record when I write about the Australian wine industry: bad news, bad news, bad news.

Most recently the bad news was the Dutch Disease. Australia’s mineral export success has driven up the foreign exchange value of the Australian dollar, making imports cheaper and exports (including wine exports) more expensive abroad.

That’s just what the shell-shocked Australian wine industry needs — higher prices or slimmer margins in key export markets! But now the bad news is even worse — the strong Aussie dollar is driving down wine prices in Australia’s domestic market and slashing producer margins there, too. How? Through “parallel import” programs that crafty retailers have put into effect. An article from the Sydney Morning Herald explains the situation.

Caution: Economics Content

Parallel imports are a consequence of a very common practice called international price discrimination. Price discrimination is the business strategy of charging different prices to different customers for similar or even identical products. Different buyers have different ability to pay and price sensitivity and it is sometimes possible to charge some customers a high price and others a low price in an attempt to extract all possible revenue from the market demand curve.

Classic examples of price discrimination include the highly complex pricing system that airlines typically employ with some seats being sold for four or five times the cheapest fare depending on when and how the ticket is purchased. Student and senior citizen discounts are relatively benign and generally accepted price discrimination examples.

International price discrimination is the practice of selling similar goods at different prices in different countries based on local demand conditions. In the case of Australian wine, for example, it appears that local wine market conditions in Brazil or Malaysia might cause winemakers to want to sell products there at lower prices than in the more mature domestic market. If the prices are set correctly, the combination of lower prices in some markets and higher prices in others can maximize the winemaker’s profit.

The Key to Price Discrimination

The key to price discrimination, according to your Econ 101 professor, is to prevent resale. The whole strategy backfires if someone finds a way to buy your products in the low price market and resell them (undercutting your sales) in the high price market. This fact limits price discrimination to situations where resale is costly, difficult or just plain impossible.

If someone finds a way to sell your discounted product back to the home market, the logic of price discrimination explodes.

Now the “parallel import” problem in Australia is that some large retailers there have discovered stocks of lower-priced Australian wines in other countries and are importing them back into Australia to sell for less. The strength of the Australian dollar (Dutch Disease again) makes this even more profitable. The Herald reports that

Parallel importing is … hurting business as supermarket chains and some of the bigger independent bottleshop chains bypass Australian brand licensees and import from third parties in countries including Brazil, Malaysia and the US.

Parallel importing hit record levels in the past year as the dollar continued to strengthen and retailers, looking for ways to drive prices down and exert control over their suppliers, became more aggressive in importing.

Some Australian producers are thus getting a double squeeze in their home market. They are exporting wine at the slimmest of margins (because of lower foreign market prices and the strong Australian dollar’s impact) only to see the wine shipped right back and sold by local retailers, undercutting their plans for higher margin home market sales.

Why do they call these “parallel imports?” I imagine it is because the imports and exports form two parallel lines, with cargo ships full of outbound and inbound wine containers crossing mid-ocean. Australian wine producers need to cross their fingers that even more bad news is not in the cards.

>>><<<

Special thanks to my Australian informant “Crocodile Chuck” for tipping me off to this situation.

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what’s “big” in the wine market (where the most consumer dollars are going) versus what’s “hot” (or “hot hot hot” as in the video above), showing the fastest growth. I’m using U.S. off-premises wine sales data from Nielsen for the 52 weeks ending 9/18/2010 taken from the December 2010 issue of Wine Business Monthly.

Baseline information: Off-premises wine sales in the U.S. totaled $9,172 million in the period covered here according to the Nielsen report, with an overall growth rate of 3.2%.

Which product categories are the largest in absolute terms and which are growing the fastest? I’m going to break down the data by wine varietal, country of origin (for imported wines) and price category. Take a minute and write down what wines/countries/price points you think will be at the top in each category and see if you’re right. Here goes

Chardonnay Leads the Way

Forget what you thought you knew about Chardonnay being so yesterday and Pinot Noir kicking Merlot’s butt. In terms of the overall retail market sales, the giants (or are they dinosaurs?) still dominate.

BIG varietals

Varietal

$ million

Chardonnay

$1,996

Cabernet Sauvignon

$1,347

Merlot

$911

Pinot Gris/Grigio

$734

Pinot Noir

$526

White Zinfandel

$427

–

American wine drinkers are nothing if not traditional, reaching again and again for familiar varietals, so the usual suspects come top of the table. Pinot Noir has indeed surged in the post-Sideways era, but its lead over wounded White Zin is not large and it still lags far behind arch nemesis Merlot.

Obvious Chardonnay is the consumer default with a 50% lead on Cabernet and double the sales of Merlot. Pinot Grigio, the #2 white varietal, lags far behind.

I find the varietal “hot list” below quite interesting. The fastest growing wine varietals are Riesling, Pinot Noir (of course), Sangiovese and Sauvignon Blanc. (Interestingly, varietal Sangiovese is rising while Chianti is a shrinking category in the Nielsen league table.)

HOT varietals

Varietal

Increase

Riesling

9.4%

Pinot Noir

8.9%

Sangiovese

8.7%

Sauvignon Blanc

8.5%

–

It seems to me that while the “big” varietals are wines that many consumers purchase to drink on their own (because of their high alcohol levels and for other reasons), the “hot varietals” are a bit more likely to be food wines. I wonder if that’s a trend?

World Wine Web

Most of the table wines that Americans drink are American — there is a very strong home country preference. Domestic wine sales totaled $6,524 million for the period covered here while imports accounted for $2,648 million. What countries supply the most imported wine as measured by total expenditures? Here’s the Big list:

BIG import countries

Country of Origin

$ million

Italy

$804

Australia

$771

Chile

$243

France

$228

Argentina

$187

New Zealand

$125

–

As the table shows, Italy and Australia are #1 and #2 respectively in off-premises sales. It is interesting that France has fallen to #4 behind Chile. Argentina and New Zealand make the cut here (Spain did not!) as you might expect, but bear in mind that Italy still sells more wine in the U.S. than Chile, France, Argentina and the Kiwis combined. The concentration ratio in this market is very high: Italy and Australia may be struggling at the moment, but they are in a league of their own.

Italy and Australia will not be over-taken soon, but the market momentum seems to have has passed. Look at the big growth numbers that Argentina and New Zealand are putting up below! Wow. Annual growth rates of more than 20%!

HOT import countries

Country of Origin

Increase

Argentina

27.6%

New Zealand

21.1%

Germany

4.4%

Chile

1.7%

Spain

0.6%

Portugal

0.3%

–

Now look at the gap between the really hot ones and the rest! Germany comes in at #3 on hot list, but with a low 4.4% increase for the year. Sales of most wine imports (including Italy and Australia) have actually fallen in the last year. Spain and Portugal squeeze onto the list at #5 and #6 by simply avoiding utter collapse. The import wine segment is slumping badly, with Argentina and New Zealand the only significant exceptions.

The Price is Right

Finally, let’s look at the market in terms of price points. What are the biggest and hottest parts of the wine wall in terms of price?

BIG price points

Price Segment

$ million

$3.00 – $5.99

$2,688

$6.00 – $8.99

$1,903

$9.00 – $11.99

$1,868

$12.00 – $14.99

$910

$0 – $2.99

$794

$15.00 – $19.99

$557

$20+

$446

–

You can see from the data why Gallo is having a good year (or probably having a good year, since they are a private company and don’t release data so I can only guess). Their brand portfolio is aimed at the heart of the market, from $3.00 to $11.99. Lots of good targets there!

You can also see why Constellation Brands is probably finding this a challenging year. They reconfigured their brand portfolio to take advantage of what they saw as upmarket opportunities. They moved up the wine wall a bit but the market changed directions and went downmarket, leaving them in a less competitive position.

HOT price points

Price segment

Increase

$9.00 – $11.99

9.1%

$20+

7.4%

$12.00 – $14.99

5.0%

$3.00 – $5.99

4.5%

$15.00 – $19.99

2.5%

$0 – $2.99

(0.1)%

$6.00 – $8.99

(4.0)%

–

But Constellation’s upmarket bet may yet pay off. The hot price segments are all in the wine wall’s upper strata.

The Old Elasticity Trap

The rise in spending in the super-premium + categories is an encouraging sign, but I think some caution is necessary in interpreting the data. Many observers see the big increase in expenditures on $20+ wines and conclude that consumers are coming back to this segment strongly — that the demand curve has shifted. But I suspect that there is a lot of bargain hunting taking place and that margins are falling – bad news. Maybe we are just following discounted prices down the demand curve.

For many of today’s buyers a $20+ retail wine is a highly discretionary purchase and so the demand curve may be quite elastic. Econ 101 students will remember that total expenditure increases when price falls for a product with an elastic demand.

The large percentage expenditure increases we seen in the data could result from discounting — $30 wines being sold off for $25 and so on — rather than an actual increase in demand or shift in the demand curve. The increased revenues are good and inspire optimism, but they may disguise the bad news of shrinking margins.

(As I am writing this, the neighborhood Safeway is offering an extra 20% off any wine selling for $20 or more. I suspect sales revenue will increase at the lower retail markup.)

Overall conclusions? I’d rather not, thanks. These data are interesting more for the questions they raise than the answers they provide. But the questions about how the U.S. wine market is changing are worth pondering (hopefully over a nice glass of wine). Cheers.

As if things weren’t bad enough in Australia, now there’s this: the Dutch Disease. No, it isn’t a fungus spread when you plant tulip bulbs in the vineyard or something you saw on the television series House MD. It’s much more serious than that. And it’s hitting South Africa, too. Look out!

Australia’s Perfect Storm

I’ve written several times about Australia’s continuing wine crisis. It seems like everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. Too much heat, too little water, excess capacity, collapsing demand — even smoke-tainted grapes caused by runaway brush fires. Yikes!

Now there is more bad news and it’s the result of too much good news? Good news is bad news? Yes. Read on.

The Dutch Disease is the name economists give to the problem of too much good news in one industry and its negative impact on the rest of the economy. If one sector of the economy gets hot on global markets (think oil exports, for example) one effect can be that export sales increase the demand for the country’s currency, causing it to appreciate in real terms. The rising currency value makes all the nation’s other products more expensive on foreign markets, sending them into a tail-spin.

The Good News the Bad News

That’s how good news in one part of the economy can backfire. The Economist magazine apparently invented the term to describe the dilemma of the Netherlands after a big gas field was found there in 1959.

The good news / bad news in Australia is clearly the fact that China’s economy is growing rapidly and sucking in the natural resources that Australia has in considerable abundance. But big purchases of the Australian dollar needed to pay for these products has pushed the currency up, making Australian wines more expensive here in the U.S.

This helps explain why off-premises sales of Australian wines are still falling here even though many other segments of the wine market are recovering. Recent Nielsen retail data show the U.S. wine market growing by 4.3 percent in the period ending in August, but sales of Australian wine fell by 7.5 percent (data from the November issue of Wine Business Monthly).

As the chart above shows, the Australian dollar has continued to appreciate since these data were compiled, magnifying both the Dutch Disease problem and the sense of crisis in the Australian wine industry.

South Africa Also Hit

South Africa seems to be experiencing the Dutch Disease as well. There are many factors that have contributed to the sharp rise of the Rand against the dollar, but surely the surge in gold prices must be the most important one. As speculators and investors who have worried about inflation turn to gold, their purchases have driven up the value of South Africa’s currency as well.

This helps explain why sales of South African wine in the U.S. have been in a bad slump. Nielsen data indicate that South African wine sales fell by 8.3 percent in August and by 9.4 percent in the last year.

The U.S. dollar’s rapid recent fall will affect all countries that depend on our huge markets for exports, but inevitably some will be hit more than others. Those like Australian and South Africa who suffer the Dutch Disease will be challenged the most.

We’ve entered an era of extremely unstable currencies, reflecting both the inherent instability of international financial flows and the increasingly cut-throat battles in the global currency wars. Inevitably many industries — including wine — will get caught in the cross-fire.

This is The Wine Economist’s 200th post since it began a little more than three years ago under the name “Grape Expectations” — a good opportunity to reflect briefly on readership trends, just as I did when we passed milepost 100.

Not that kind of list!

Milepost 200

The Wine Economist has an unusually broad readership given its focus (wine economics), content (no wine reviews, no ratings) and style (most posts are way longer than is typical for weblogs).

I never expected to get millions of visitors like Dr. Vino or Gary V. and other popular wine critic sites, so I’m surprised by how many people have found this page and come back to read and re-read.

About 200,000 visitors have clicked on these links, sometimes with surprising intensity. The Wine Economist has been ranked as high as #6 in the big “Food” category where wine blogs are filed in Technorati‘s daily ratings and as high as the top 30 in the even broader “Living” group.

Reader Favorites

The most-read articles of the last few days are always listed in the right-hand column on this page, so it is easy to see track reader behavior. I thought you might be interested in readership trends since the blog began. Here are the top ten Wine Economist articles of all time.

Matt Ferchen and Steve Burkhalter (both former students of mine now based in China) reported on Portugal’s efforts to break into the wine market there. The commentaries by Matt, Steve and KW received a lot of attention inside the wine trade, but their thoughtful, fresh approaches also drew links, re-posts and readers from the far corners of the web world.

Looking back, I think my favorite post was probably the very first one, a report on my experiences working with the all-volunteer bottling crew at Fielding Hills winery. I learned a lot that day about the real world of wine and I continue to benefit from my association with Mike and Karen Wade (and their daughter, Robin, another former student) who have taught me a lot about wine, wine making and wine markets.

Look for another report like this when The Wine Economist turns 300. Cheers!

>>><<<

Thanks to everyone who’s helped me in various ways with these first 200 posts. I couldn’t have done it without you! (Special thanks to Sue, my #1 research assistant!)

Sometimes the good news is that the bad news could be much worse. At least that’s how it seemed to me when the wine economists met at UC Davis last week to discuss the continuing Australian wine crisis.

Kym Anderson, a leading expert, spoke about the problems in Oz at the symposium on “Outlook and Issues for the World Wine Market” and I thought his assessment of the “challenges” Australia faces was pretty grim. Big oversupply. Falling grape prices. More and more quality grapes sold off at fire-sale prices in the bulk market (40% this year compared to 15% in the past).

The best selling white wine type in Australia isn’t from Australia any more — it’s Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. Even the Australians are tired of “Brand Australia” Chardonnay!

Maybe, Baby

Professor Anderson looked for a light at the end of the tunnel and was able to point to some potential sources of relief. Maybe water reforms could be implemented. Maybe R&D to help the industry deal with climate change would produce results. Maybe the new export strategy to promote Australia’s regional diversity and wine families would catch on. Maybe the China market will open wider and drink up the surplus.

Since the bad news was so compellingly concrete and the hopeful notes so speculative, I took the overall forecast to be very dark indeed. Imagine my surprise, then, when I attended a talk by another Australian expert the next day who described Anderson’s presentation as optimistic! When the good news is this bad, the bad news must be really bad.

Bad News, Bad News

Sure enough more bad news arrived shortly thereafter in the form of a Wine Spectator article, “Aussie Wine Company Faces Angry Creditor,” concerning the financial problems of The Grateful Palate group, which exports many hot brands to the U.S. market including the unlikely-named Luchador Shiraz shown here.

Trouble is brewing in Australia. The Grateful Palate’s Australian affiliates, which produce wine under labels such as Bitch Grenache, Evil Cabernet Sauvignon and Marquis Philips for American importer Dan Philips, are in receivership and face the danger of possible bankruptcy. Growers and other creditors for the South Australia-based affiliates of the company received notice on June 18. Many growers, already facing tough times, worry that they’ll never get paid for fruit they sold Philips.

Philips, the company’s founder and owner, confirmed that he is in negotiations with his top creditor, Dutch lender Rabobank, but declined further comment. The bank initiated the action to put Grateful Palate International Pty Ltd and several related Australian companies into receivership. The most prominent is R Wines, a partnership with winemaker Chris Ringland, but 3 Rings, a joint venture involving Philips, Ringland and grower David Hickinbotham, is also part of it.

This is bad news, of course, but bad news is no longer a surprise to those of us who are following the Australian wine scene. Perhaps it is really good news of a sort — an indication that the necessary industry shake out is gaining speed. Hard to tell good news from bad.

Darker or Brighter?

The same situation applies to the Foster’s de-merger situation. Foster’s, the Australian beer giant, bought into the wine business at the top of the market, paying an estimated $7 billion for an international portfolio of about 50 top brands including Penfolds, Wolf Blass and Beringer. The investment may be worth as little as $1.5 billion in today’s market.

Foster’s beer business is an attractive target for global giants like SABMiller, but not with the wine portfolio attached. So Foster’s announced a de-merger to allow the beer group to move ahead independently of the wine group. What will happen to the wine business? Who will buy these assets in today’s depressed environment?

When I posed this question to an Australian winemaker several weeks ago the answer came back quickly: China! Everyone in Australia is paranoid about the Chinese buying up our natural resources, and so we are convinced that they will buy up Foster’s wine business, too.

Interesting idea, I thought at the time. No multinational wine firm (Constellation Brands? Gallo?) would want to go bigger right now. But maybe a Chinese firm that wants to break into the global markets would take the bait. Might make sense. Maybe.

Bright Idea

Sure enough, the Bright Food Group. (Mission: “To build the company into a leading enterprises group in the national food industry, with famous brands, advanced technology, strong competitive power and deep influence in the world by the end of 2015.”) recently signed a three-way memorandum of understanding with the New South Wales government and the China Development Bank to explore opportunities for the Bright Group to invest in the sugar, dairy and wine industries.

AFinancial Times article reports that the company is interested in “global top ten players in wine, sugar, food packaging, commodities and healthcare sectors.” Bright Food is currently studying both wine and beer assets in Australia, but has not decided to buy either yet according to the FT.

Many Australians no doubt consider the potential sale of yet another natural resource business to Chinese buyers bad news in terms of their economic sovereignty, but that bad news might actually be the best news they can expect given the sorry condition of the global wine market today.

The stock market has the jitters these days and one of the causes is the fear that, even with massive fiscal and monetary stimulus, we may be experiencing a jobless recovery. Things looks OK from the outside (some of the numbers are pretty good), but bad things are still happening deep down where it counts.

A Wine-Free Recovery?

There is some concern that the wine economy is suffering a similar fate. Not a wine-free recover, but just not the big turnaround everyone was hoping for. Although retail sales numbers are cheerfully positive, with overall sales rising at close to double-digit rates and increases even in the $25+ “death zone” range, there’s still enough disturbing news around to give anyone the jitters.

Are jitters justified? I decided to do some fieldwork to see what I could learn about conditions on the ground in my local wine market. An upscale supermarket down the street has recently undergone a major remodel and is have a grand re-opening. One of the areas that seems to have received a lot of attention is the wine wall. Since the supermarket chain is known to do very thorough market research I wanted to see what the redesign would tell me about state of the wine economy today.

First Impressions

My initial impression was very positive. The wine wall is substantially increased in terms of the number of square feet of display space. The quality of the space is much improved, too, with the old industrial shelving replaced in part by the sort of dark wood cases and racks that you see at fine wine shops. Good news! A big investment like this suggests optimism about the future of the wine market.

A second glance provided more information. The wine wall is large enough to need directional signs to help customers find their “comfort zone” area. Some of the signs were what you would expect: “France/Italy,” Australia” and so on. Just what you’d expect. But other signs pointed to continued “trading down.”

I found areas marked “premium 1.5 liter,” “value wines” and “box wines” and one that said simply “White Zinfandel.” It’s obvious that the marketing and design people knew that many of their customers would be looking for low cost or basic wines and they wanted to help them find them.

Box wine sales surged in the “trading down” wine economy that wine people like to think is over, but apparently isn’t. There were a number of quality bag-in-box wines for sale in this section, which was conveniently located adjacent to the expanded take-out delicatessen and bakery areas.

The White Zin section held both the expected Sutter Home and Beringer products plus a limited range of inexpensive domestic rosé wines and a small selection of fruit wine and fruit-flavored wines. My wine snob friends are probably shocked to learn that White Zin, the wine they love to hate is so popular that it has its own part of the wine wall. That would be trading down in both price and quality, they say.

Unexpected Discoveries

Now it was time to study the main section of the wine wall carefully. I was impressed by the large selection, of course. Lots of wines. Lots of brands. But some of the wines had unfamiliar labels that I think may be part of a “dumping” strategy where big producers sell off surplus wine under an ersatz value brand to avoid weakening the price position of established brands.

This is a very common practice in Australia, where the wines are sold with very generic labels. They call them “cleanskins” and I guess they are selling like hotcakes. The surplus wine, some of which could be very good, may be trickling down into a sort of branded cleanskins market here in the U.S. But there’s another trickle down effect that got my attention.

As I surveyed the wine wall I was struck by a small number of hard-to-find or impossible-to-buy wines that were sitting quietly waiting to be found — fine wine that I suspect didn’t find a home in the usual wine club / fine wine shop / restaurant supply chain.

Since we’ve recently returned from a Napa Valley research trip, I was especially struck by the presence of two wines from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars – their Fay Vineyard Cabernet and the famous Cask 23. The Fay sold for $87 or $79 for buyers with the store loyalty card. Buy a case and get a further 10 percent discount. The Cask 23’s price was $164.

You can buy Opus One for $209 ($179 with your loyalty card) or Sassicaia for $245 ($213). The Chimney Rock SLV Cab that I liked a lot when I tasted it in California was a bargain at $60 ($48 with your card).

Pétrus at the 7-Eleven?

It’s hard to believe that these great wines can be found on neighborhood supermarket shelves. I could be wrong, but I suspect that they would not be found there during good economic times. But bad times drives good wines down the supply chain. That’s trickle down [wine] economics.

What’s next? Pétrus at the 7-Eleven? No, although 7-Eleven does have an own wine brand called Yosemite Road.

I’m glad there is finally good news about wine sales in the U.S., but while trading down may have stabilized I don’t think the sour economy’s effects will soon disappear. And so the trickle down effect continues. No wonder everyone’s got the jitters.

I’ve written a lot about Australia’s wine crisis and for a long time I felt like Chicken Little. The sky is falling, I’d say, but Australia seemed somehow to muddle through.

There is a strong sense now, however that Australia’s crisis has arrived. (I was going to write something about Australia’s Chicken Littles coming home to roost, but it was too awful even for me.)

Sales of Australian wine are down here in the U.S., dragging down sales of Syrah/Shiraz from all places with it. It’s worse in Great Britain, Australia’s number one export market, I’m told.

Charles Gent’s article “The Writing on the Wall,” posted today on Inside Story, provides an excellent overview of the situation and is required reading for anyone interested in Australia’s wine future.

I find a number of parallels between the Australian wine crisis as explained in Gent’s article and the global financial crisis that I wrote about in my recent book Globaloney 2.0.

First, this isn’t the first wine crisis in Australia’s history. Gent writes that

Visiting an ageing Hunter Valley winery in the late 1950s, wine aficionado Max Lake was struck by a faded notice on the door, apparently dating from the Great Depression. Beneath the forbidding heading “Warning to Growers,” it read: “Owing to the dangerous position arising from Overproduction, Growers are warned against any further planting of Wine Grapes.” Beneath the text was the name of Herbert Kay, chairman of the Australian Wine Board.

Two months ago, the Wine Board’s modern equivalents slapped a similar notice on Australia’s wine producers. Issued jointly by the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia, Wine Grape Growers’ Australia, the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation and the Grape and Wine Research and Development Corporation, the statement is more wordy than the 1930s edict, but equally blunt in its message. It states that Australia is producing twenty to forty million more cases of wine than it can sell each year, and that the current surplus stockpile, calculated at more than 100 million cases, will double in two years if current levels of production and demand persist.

A second feature is that the wine bubble (because that is what it was) had all the main features of a financial bubble including the fact that anyone who looked at it objectively would have recognized it as such. But these Chicken Littles could not compete with those with an interest in keeping the bubble growing.

The massive plantings were seen by many industry figures as a desirable and necessary corollary of the soaring offshore demand, and traditional grape growers who expressed misgivings about the rate of expansion got short shrift. As president of the Winemakers’ Federation in 1999, Brian Croser described their concerns as a “Luddite viewpoint” and called the tax scheme plantings “a great resource.”

Finally, to keep this post reasonably brief, it isn’t enough to just pull out a few vines and go back to business as usual. More fundamental reform is needed.

To go forward, it seems the industry first has to take a step backward. In other words, says Strahan, “We have to get rid of the oversupply as quickly as possible to start bringing some margin back into the business, and to start getting a connection with the consumer that is not defined by price.”

That’s not quite back to square one, but it’s close.

>>><<<

Update 1/5/2010.

Decanter.com reports that Constellation Brands has cancelled 300 grower contracts in South Australia, another sign of the rapid consolidation of the wine industry down under. Decanter reports that …

Australia’s biggest buyer of wine grapes advised growers just before the New Year that they would see their contracts end after the 2012 vintage.

The company had previously given three years’ notice to more than 200 other contracted growers in December 2008.

The decision has come at a time when growers in the region are facing plummeting wine grape prices.

In some cases growers are being offered up to 50 per cent less for their grapes than in 2008, according to figures released by Constellation and other major wineries in December.

Post navigation

The Wine Economist

What would you get if you crossed the Wine Spectator, America's best-selling wine magazine, with the Economist, the world's leading business weekly? The answer is this blog, The Wine Economist, which analyzes and interprets today's global wine markets. The Wine Economist was named 2015 "Best in the World" wine blog by Gourmand International. Staff: Mike Veseth (editor-in-chief) & Sue Veseth (contributing editor).